by Joe Duarte
Climate activism has a long history of innumeracy and gaps in baseline scientific knowledge (ask an activist how much warming is projected from now to 2100 in a moderate IPCC scenario – the flagship warming phenomenon). Some years ago, I came upon something so stupid that it paralyzed me. It locked my brain when I tried to write about it, and I let it sit for years like a Horcrux I dare not touch. Just knowing that it was out there bothered me.
It’s the opening paragraph of a 2012 Rolling Stone article by Bill McKibben – “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math”. It’s a remarkable artifact that I’ve come to use as a test of applied intelligence and reading ability. Only one person has ever passed, and every climate scientist I’ve tried has failed, including Gavin Schmidt and Katharine Hayhoe:
If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
The final, bolded clause is the test. Focus on his claim – the 327th consecutive month that the temperature of the globe exceeded the 20th-century average, on which he performs some sort of probability calculation. (From now on, I’ll abbreviate the 20th-century average as the 20C average, not to be confused with the actual value, which was 13.9 °C.)
Pause here and ponder his sentence. Do you understand what he’s saying? What does he mean by his “odds” claim? Is his statement valid? Is it true? What do you need to know to evaluate it?
Take your time, come back tomorrow, or keep reading as you wish.
You might’ve noticed his error in calling 3.7 × 10⁻⁹⁹ a large number (and implicitly an integer). It’s an infinitesimal number, a fractional decimal that starts with 0.00000… That’s not the core problem, so set that aside. (Note that Rolling Stone hasn’t corrected this obvious error in 13 years.)
Focus on his core claim — the 327th consecutive month that the temperature of the globe exceeded the 20C average, on which he performs some sort of probability calculation.
Let’s clarify that his span of months covers 27¼ years, running from March, 1985 through May, 2012.
He’s saying that this span was warmer than the 20C average. Clear?
That’s odd, since of course it was. That’s what warming means. If the earth warmed throughout the 20th century, then of course the late 20th and early 21st centuries will be warmer than the 20C average, unless it cooled significantly during that period.
What about his odds statement? Well, not all strings of words are meaningful, and his is not. Before we proceed, let’s ground ourselves with this graph of global temperatures from 1901-2012.
McKibben is essentially looking at this warming trend and saying “Wow, the monthly temperatures starting in 1985 are always above the 20C average, and isn’t that incredibly fishy?” His span starts at 0.22 °C above that average (March, 1985) per the NOAA global land and ocean data.
This is about as stupid as humans get.
McKibben doesn’t provide any sources or identify the dataset he used, but they’re all similar enough for our purposes. It wasn’t the NOAA data, or his span would’ve started in 1979, adding 72 months.
NOTE: All temperatures here are Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST), a complex statistic that draws from thousands of stations and involves various corrections and weights. I’m not confident in its validity or utility as a construct, but let’s grant it for present purposes.
First, let’s note that the earth is a planet, not a sidewalk, and as such it rarely cools by more than 0.22 °C in a month. As you can see, by the late 1990s, temperatures would have to drop by at least 0.4 °C to dip below the 20C average. The graph is annual, not monthly, but it gives us the gist, and no month from 1901 to 2012 cooled by 0.4 °C or more. The average monthly change from 1901 – 2012 was 0.00071 °C of warming.
Back to his odds statement. What is this 3.7 x 10⁻⁹⁹ number? It’s a probability – which he incorrectly calls odds – and he says it’s the probability of every month in that span remaining above the 20C average “by simple chance”. That statement has no meaning, but let’s pause to figure out how he computed this.
For some reason he thinks monthly averages are important and he performed some sort of calculation regarding this string of 327 months. What calculation? It must be this:
So what was his x? Well, we need to solve an exponential equation, child’s play for the American man. We can take the log of both sides and work the steps or just invert and switch the exponent. Therefore:
Which equals 0.5.
When I discovered this a few years ago, I wanted to go on walkabout. We won’t have a civilization for long if this savagery is normalized. McKibben treated a planetary climate system as a monthly coin flip, such that global temperatures had even odds of landing on either side of his arbitrary baseline, even though the planet was well above that baseline at the start. If in one month the earth was, say, 0.4 °C above the 20C average, he’s saying there are even odds that the next month it would either:
- Cool by more than 0.4 °C.
- Cool by less than 0.4 °C, warm by any amount, or stay the same.
In reality, Option 2 was certain — the earth has never cooled ≥ 0.4 °C in any month from 1901 – 2012.
He took 0.5, treated it as an independent probability, and multiplied it by itself over and over — 326 times — thinking that he was computing the “odds” of every month in that 1985-2012 span remaining above the 20C average by “simple chance”.
That formulation has no meaning. There’s no such thing as “the odds of every month from 1985 to 2012 remaining above the 20C average by simple chance”. The earth is a planet — its surface temperature and energy balance are physical, empirical realities, it doesn’t randomly reset every month, and his span starts at a temperature that is already well above his arbitrary 20C baseline. The earth won’t shed such massive amounts of energy in a month.
It’s like asking for the odds that the earth remains a planet from 1985 to 2012, as opposed to turning into a dog or something, “by simple chance”. This string of words has no meaning. You could compute some probabilities of a monthly average – or a string of them – being above or below a baseline, but if you use a baseline well below normal fluctuation, and during a warming trend, you know the answer without needing to compute anything. In any case, there is no “simple chance” – it’s an empirical question that would be powered by empirical data and modeling. You can’t do anything with a calculator and a fixed, independent probability like 0.5 or any other value.
By “simple chance”, McKibben might means “if not for global warming”. But the earth did warm, he started with the earth 0.22 °C above his baseline, and again the earth is a planet, not a coin. He thinks his probability calculation is new information, that it adds to the evidence for warming and cause for alarm.
McKibben found a way to take the observed warming — the recent past that we already knew about — and turn it into a “terrifying” new development. He made the past terrifying.
That is truly remarkable and highlights the profound neuroticism, emotion dysregulation, and innumeracy that drives so much leftist climate panic. This is not a scientifically serious movement or belief system. A major media outlet published this – what might be the most savagely stupid misinformation we’ll ever see, and in thirteen years has not noticed or corrected it. It’s not just a failure of baseline intelligence, but of cognitive activation. The people at Rolling Stone are not able to read his opening paragraph and understand what he did. In fact, I’m not sure they could follow this explainer.
Similarly, partisan media outlets are not able to read fraudulent or invalid climate science consensus papers and notice that they’re fraudulent or invalid. We have a broad and deep problem with getting people to read attentively across topics, especially when they’re politicized. We’re just not getting adequate {baseline IQ + attention} focused on media articles and claims. So much nonsense is flowing into our brains — collectively, we’re not operating at a sufficient level of consciousness. It shouldn’t be possible for McKibben to have published his claim, nor for it to remain uncorrected for 13 years.
Testing the Experts
I mentioned that I use McKibben’s paragraph as a test.
In 2022, I asked two climate scientist-activists a basic question: Starting now, what’s the probability of any given month’s GMST being higher than the 20th century average?
Gavin Schmidt got the answer right straight away – 100%. He stumbled in understanding what McKibben did, saying that it was “the likelihood of the observed trend assuming no external forcing”, but no trend is needed for monthlies to not drop below the 20C average when you start 0.22 °C above it. I don’t think Schmidt realized that the period started in 1985. More fundamentally, taking an imagined probability to the 327th power does not yield the likelihood of anything, much less the likelihood of the observed trend assuming no external forcing.
I also asked Katharine Hayhoe. I never got her to understand the question. It’s an unusual question, but trivially easy if you just take a second to think about it. It takes a certain versatility and rigor to be able to reason about novel questions and step outside the scripted cognition that can dominate our daily lives.
Worse, Hayhoe didn’t seem to know the 20C average offhand or where we were relative to it. It was awkward for me to know more about basic climate science facts than a purported climate scientist – I’m a social psychologist. The red flags on Hayhoe’s website proved prescient – she very awkwardly brags about honors she’s received, including “World’s Greatest Leaders”, “100 Most Influential People”, and even wrote “In 2019 I was honoured to be named to Foreign Policy’s list of 100 Global Thinkers for the second time” (emphasis hers).
I would be so embarrassed to disclose that anyone had named me one of the “100 Most Influential People” or a “World’s Greatest Leader” – I can’t imagine putting it on my own website. I knew Hayhoe was a political partisan committed to stoking fear and hatred over mild climate change, but I hoped she would at least understand the barbarism of what McKibben did. I wanted leftists like her and Schmidt to be the voices of reason and get Rolling Stone to correct, but I couldn’t even get her to understand basic climate science.
In any case, the full test is to present McKibben’s opening paragraph, highlighting the clause about the 327 months, and see if people can identify the problem. They’ll need to solve for his x and know the basic background fact that the earth warmed over the course of the 20th century. It will help if they have a sense of how much the earth warmed and what monthly fluctuation looks like. It’s a fascinating test because it requires a level of attention and exogenous intelligence that people rarely apply to what they read[1]. Try it.
Joe Duarte grew up in copper mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. His website features more of his work and you
can reach him at gravity at protonmail.com.
[1] I’m curious to see if the popular AIs can see the problem. In fact, it might be an excellent formal test for them, depending on the prompt.
Almost every month since 1850 has been warmer than the 1750 to 1850 average.
Thank God for that.
Plus there has been more CO2 ppm
Thank fossil fuels for that
Net-zero by 2050 to-reduce CO2 is a super-expensive suicide pact, to increase command/control by governments, and enable the moneyed elites to get richer, at the expense of all others, by using the foghorn of the government-subsidized/controlled Corporate Media to spread scare-mongering slogans and brainwash people.
.
Ignore CO2, because greater CO2 ppm in atmosphere is an absolutely essential ingredient for: 1) increased green flora to increase fauna all over the world, and 2) increased crop yields to feed 8 billion people.
Middlebury College in Vermont, has an Environmental Studies Department.
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/vermont-is-harvesting-wood-far-in-excess-annual-net-addition-of
The Department receives federal and state government grants and alumni bequests to perform environment-related studies
McKibben was the head of the study
The Department held a Senior Student Seminar (ES 401) during the Winter of 2010 regarding the CO2 emissions of the Campus wood burning plant, and the sequestering of CO2 by the forest owned by the College.
McKibben, a former proponent of tree-burning, was the head of the study
According to the Campus wood burning plant website, the best estimate of wood chip delivery is 20,000 tons of green wood chips per year.
Incorrect CO2 Calculation
The seminar report states: “Thus, a more realistic estimate of carbon emissions is: 20,000, US ton of green wood x 0.50, moisture content x 44/12 x 1 = 36,667 tons of carbon”. See URL, pages 38 and 39.
This calculation is incorrect, because it did not account for the carbon content of dry wood
BTW, the word “carbon” should read “CO2”
http://www.middlebury.edu/media/view/255078/original/Winter_2010carbon_sequestration.pdf
Correct CO2 Calculation
The wood chips contain 20,000, US ton of green wood x 0.50, moisture content = 10,000 US ton of dry wood.
The dry wood contains 10,000 US ton of dry wood x 0.487 lb carbon/lb dry wood = 4,870 US ton of carbon.
The CO2 created by combustion is 44/12 x 4,870 = 17,857 US ton of CO2.
The report overstated the CO2 emissions by 36,667/17,856 = 2.05 times
Incorrect Calculation of CO2 Sequestered by the Forest
The report states: “Middlebury College-owned forests, 1295 ha (3200 acre), will sequester about 9,905 US ton of carbon/y, or 9905/3200 = 3.095 US ton of carbon/acre, or 44/12 x 3.095 = 11.35 US ton of CO2/acre. See URL, page 39, table 7
For reference: Vermont forestland, 4,511,000 acres, sequestered about 4,390,000 metricton of CO2, or 0.973 metric ton of CO2/acre, or 1.073 US ton of CO2/acre, per US Forest Service.
https://fpr.vermont.gov/sites/fpr/files/Forest_and_Forestry/The_Forest_Ecosystem/Library/Forest%20Carbon%20Inventory%20_Mar%202017_final.pdf
The report overstated the sequestered CO2 by 11.35/1.073 = 10.6 times
I sent McKibben a copy of my numbers
He told me he would forward it to the proper persons
Those are the type of enviros who fear-monger us, are taxing us, are mandating us, and are telling us what to do with our hard-earned money.
They should be reduced to nothing
I wish they would all take up the Palestinian cause, like Greta, and go to Gaza to protest.
You are too kind.
They belong in jail for grand deception and grand larceny, mis-appropriating federal funds to create bogus numbers that closely agree with their mantras to continue to fool the people.
Yeah, and have plenty of pride flags at the vanguard as they march in to tell Hamas what great guys they are.
You can also thank fossil fuels for generating the heat that thermometers respond to.
Some people imagine that CO2 makes thermometers hotter! Imagine that!
Just for perspective in these troubling times:
Earth receives more solar energy in one hour, that all the energy used by humanity in a year.
I have not verified these numbers except to see that there are many sources reporting about the same ones, and given that caveat, here are some actual numbers (what McKibben might call “hard numbers”. Or maybe not. Since his hard numbers, aren’t, what does he call actual hard numbers? Hmmm…pondering the imponderable vicissitudes…):
We burned about 505 exajoules of fossil fuel energy last year, collectively as a civilization (such as it is), and this was about 83% of all energy used.
The Sun delivers to Earth in one year of time, is about 3,850,000 Exajoules of energy.
505 from digging up stuff and lighting it on fire, 3,850,000 shining onto our planet every year…forever, and since forever*.
*Forever in this context has been determined to be 4,500,000,000 years.
In a row.
Inclusive.
In round numbers.
It’s hard to say.
A long time.
About 70% is reflected as short wave, about 30% as long wave
Less than 0.5% is retained by flora and fauna processes, which vastly exceeds our 505 exajoules from sequestered carbon in 2025.
“About 70% is reflected as short wave, about 30% as long wave”
Wait, what?
You have 100% of incoming solar energy being “reflected”.
I guess you meant to say something else.
I think we are all familiar with the energy budget cartoon.
No need to go off on that tangent, IMO.
The point I made was that the actual thermal energy released by all of our burning of fossil fuels cannot possibly be significant, considering the magnitude by which it is dwarfed by the massive energy flows through the Earth system already.
The Warmistas do not claim global warming is from burning FF, just as they do not claim that CO2 by itself generates heat on thermometers, as if it was causing them to malfunction or something.
I think the Warmistas may have imbedded trolls who pretend to be skeptics but toss out complete gobbledygook, along with the more obvious brands of trolls, the Griffs, as I think of them.
Not 100% sure is one of these, but he does seem to be someone who I find myself hoping, he is not on my side of any important discussions of fact.
70% is reflected to space as short wave, 30% sent to space as long wave
Sorry, I missed your point before.
However, at night, thermometers are assuredly not responding to sunlight. If a thermometer shows a trend of minimum temperatures rising at night, then the source of increased heat must be coming from somewhere else.
Where would you surmise this might be coming from?
They believe that adding CO2 to air makes it hotter. They believe that this occurs due to a GHE, for which no consistent or unambiguous description exists.
The supernatural at work. Religion, not science.
That could be right, depending on your definition of “reflected”. As Fourier said, the Earth loses to space all the energy which it receives from the Sun. Sounds like 100% “reflection” to me.
I’m sure a GHE believer can come up with a consistent and unambiguous description of “reflection” which doesn’t involve a surface losing 100% of the energy which impinges on it.
After all, GHE believers redefine “slower cooling” to mean “getting hotter”.
0.5% of 38500 = 19250 exajoules, which is much more than the 510 exajoules from fossil fuels.
We should rejoice we have fossil fuels, because their CO2 ppm increases greening, which increases fauna, and crop yields to feed 8 billion people.
No more agonizing and navel gazing about CO2, a trace gas, that is a very weak aborber of only the photons with the right frequencies. It is not possible for it to heat anything.
Exactly. And after four and a half billion years of receiving this awesome amount of energy, the surface has managed to cool.
Backing up Fourier (the one who wrote Fourier’s Heat Law), who said that the Earth loses all the heat from the Sun to outer space.
No GHE, by the look of it. Even now, the Earth is losing 44 TW (according to real scientists). Cooling, in other words.
Trump just put out guidelines for doing research at various federal agencies.
Conclusions must be based on experimentally verified data.
Reports may or may not be published even after peer review, plus after top official review.
Golden rule – who has the gold, makes the rules.
Imagine the bleating if ALL Government research was required to be published! Secret weapons research, for example. About as bizarre as requiring drug companies to publish research which showed their drugs were less effective than completely inert placebos!
People who get strident about “transparency” for others, don’t seem all that willing to practice it themselves. Privacy, and all that.
Probability and statistics 101 teaches that the outcome of each flip of a fair coin is an independent event. McKibben is a moron for thinking that the temperature in a month in any given year is completely independent of that same month in any given previous year. SMH.
McKibben is a moron. You could have stopped right there.
So what are the “odds” the global temperature for the last 327 month is below the average global temperature of the last 10,000 years? They almost certainly are and that is a much larger sample then 35 years or what ever McKibben used.
There are no odds for historical fact, except for those who re-write history.
What are the odds for odd people like McKibben?
The odds for odd people like McKibben are insanely high.
Chances are, his chances are awfully good.
If life was a musical, this song would have just started playing…
https://youtu.be/NEH3uqbpsm8?si=FhIGDSMSZIzj4AFn
😎
“Odds” are …er… were that Japan would win the Battle of Midway.
But the US won instead.
(Even with breaking the Japanese code, it was a “happy accident” that two groups of dive bombers independently arrived over the carriers within minutes of each other while the Zeros were still low over the water after chasing the torpedo bombers.)
“the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe”
The last word above is the problem. There is no global temperature. The nonsensical average that we’re constantly presented with is utterly meaningless.
A metric lacking any merit.
This is the same globe losing 44 TW, called “cooling”, or some imaginary globe?
3.7 x 10-99 is an impressive number. Want to get a more impressive number: Use seconds instead of month 😉
With the same logic the odds that the last quarter century was above the average temperature of the 20th century is 50% — not very impressive.
I thought he meant (3.7 x 10) – 99 or 271,
Good post.
Here’s another test. How likely is it to ever reliably rule out natural causes for a 0.015C per year long-term warming trend, as the reported global average surface air temperature warms and cools about 3.8C on an annual cycle as an obviously natural response to absorbed energy?
Not likely at all, I would say.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/?dm_id=world
P.S. Yes, I know that the concept of a global average surface air temperature is a poor indicator of the climate state of the planet to begin with.
Fredi Otto and her World Weather Attribution gang are at it again now claiming that in the year from May 2024 to May 2025 “four billion people suffer extra month of extreme heat” and that in almost all countries….. the number of extreme heat days has at least doubled compared to a world without climate change.
Poor Fredi, her life must be so hard!
Gee, in my little corner of the world, shared with about 4 million other people, we have not had a single “extreme heat day” so far this year. We’ve had a mild winter and a mild spring, so far – just beginning to warm up, but then it is going to be cooler than “normal” the next few days.
For most people, the global climate isn’t a very important matter – it is our local weather that matters.
Down here, a bit north of Sydney, he had a couple of “rather warm” days in December. iirc.
Extreme heat.. nope. !
Freddie and her little computer games are hilarious !!
I hear that Lake Ayre is refilling quite extensively. Any news on that from the source of the story?
I always give credence to such details as can be gleaned from actually being at the location where something is occurring, as opposed to, say, erasing data and filling it in with what I thought would fit better with what I already think is true.
But that is just me.
Oi!
4.23 billion people didn’t suffer an extra month of extreme heat.
““four billion people suffer extra month of extreme heat””
People living above 50ºN.. where “extreme” heat is defines as anything above15ºC 😉
Omitted: The other 4 billion experience one *less* month of “extreme heat” (whatever the hell that means).
If you modeled the climate as a random walk with lots of auto-correlation between successive time intervals, ran a billion simulations and then computed the odds, you might get something meaningful. The problem is that the effective dimensionality of the problem is not 327, it is much lower.
Joe, you’re an idiot. Just as expected. You don’t understand this thing, and you even brag about it. The calculation is about whether the currently observable warming is just some kinda epiphenomenon, some kind of a random chance occurrence. Because in steady state (with, of course, variability) each and every month should be either higher or lower than a long running average of the given month. The chance of both are 50%. Well, this is more like a thought experiment, just to illustrate in a popular scientific journal how unlikely the current climate is if we only assume some kinda variability as a factor in change.
In other words, mere “chance” can safely be excluded as a possibility. We have an ongoing climate change. Science tells us more about the causes of this, and those are anthropogenic, of course.
and
These are gems, illustration that you don’t get this whole thing, and your stupidity is breathtaking. A higher baseline just make the whole thing stronger. BTW, the end of the reference period (the 20th century) includes more than half of the strange series of months, and the success series still holds. Because this actually lifts up the average and even with the higher average, we get the series’ property right. It’s funny that you don’t get this.
Nyolci, during the PETM, global temperatures are widely accepted to have been 5°-8°C warmer than the present temperatures.
Using your claims as a basis, what are the odds that the last 327 months are colder than the PETM purely by chance?
Or for that matter, the 18th century contained the Little Ice Age. Temperatures in the 19th century were well above those of the LIA … what are the odds of that happening purely by chance?
I’ll wait …
w.
🙂 Willis, you’re the other Joe here. How about a 327 month long period during the PETM? You should think about that. Because this is about that. You genius.
You mean a 5000+ year period that was warmer than now ??
The casual insults are bad enough to ID you a truly detestable jackass, IMO.
But inserting smiley faces with your insults is just going too dang far!
It is ON now, pal!
Princess Snowflake 😉
You are not smart enough to realize he put you on the spot and you failed catastrophically!
But why, Tommy, why? 🙂
Only your parents can answer that.
You don’t have a choice, do you?
It’s also widely accepted by sane physicists that people who believe that CO2 increases the temperature of the Earth are completely detached from reality.
In any case, the Earth loses 44 TW or so. That’s called “cooling”, Willis. More energy out than in. When the Earth’s surface was molten, that means it has “cooled” since then.
You do understand the difference between “cooling” and “warming”, do you?
Slow cooling is not called “warming” or “heating”. Adding CO2 to air does not make it hotter.
Sorry about that, but your mental acuity seems to be as well-developed as McKibben’s.
Mr. Flynn: You pretend to know the energy going-out-and-in going back to molten-earth days. You have just as much to contribute to the conversation as nyolci, the vanity-plate-for-name dude.
Do I really? If you choose not to believe that the Earth has cooled from the molten state, I won’t disagree. You believe in a “GHE” that cannot be described in any consistent and unambiguous way.
Religion is not science.
Wait, that guy was serious?
I thought he was being sarcastic and had upvoted him!
As sarcasm, it was brilliant.
If he actually means all that and believes it, well then hot dang Martha, fetch the shootin’ iron fulla rock salt, we got a live one done stumbled in!
Your projection is much more breathtaking
Mr. Wanderer: I’m still laughing at this letter-salad name. CliSci seems to attract folks who studied math just enough to get it wrong.
Well, to be fair about it Paul (Hi pal, long time!), it also attracts folks who, for instance, got an A in 2 semesters of engineering calculus, but only recall that it was very complicated and took a lot of concentration to get it straight.
And oi, the finals.
And east I figured out early on that there was no point in “cramming” for tests.
If you did not learn it after sitting in the class listening to it being explained every day, practicing by doing the homework every night, you sure as hell where not going to suddenly figure it out in a flash of insight by staying up all night drinking the cupboards bare of coffee!
(Actually, IIRC, I did my homework right after class while sitting at home with the stereo blasting rock music at max volume, the Three Stooges on the TV with the sound off, and whilst imbibing plenty of grog and various smokable substances, on the theory that if I could do it under those highly improbable distractions, I could certainly do it while sitting quietly in a class first thing in the morning.)
More recently, I realized, hey, wait a second, them colleges are filled with a bunch of drunk children away from home for the first time in their lives, and they get all these degrees and such with about 15 hours of work (yeah right, as if drinking beer and staying up all night is work!) a week, in only four years, starting from knowing as much as high school kids know, IOW, not much!
Imagine how much more we could get out of it, if we went there at around retirement age instead?
I was reading about some women who was a doctor at age 80, but who never went to college until she was in her 60’s! Also there are marathon runners who never even ran around the block prior to retiring at a ripe old age!
Heck, I recall that back in the olden days, we used to use a rope for a belt, and we kept an onion in the belt, you know, because of the war and all…
I am gonna end this now, before I start in with telling pointless stories that go nowhere…
Hey, before I go…Do you know what the Early Bird Special is tonight at the Del Boca Vista diner?
Mr. M: Thanks for long, funny reply, I remember you! As for that diner, I could tell a story about a diner that had great real chili (the Green Bay kind), but it might go somewhere! Maybe Mr. nyolci knows the special, but don’t expect him to calculate the tip.
……..“you’re an idiot.”
Look in a mirror and reflect on what you said.
The planet has been warmer than now for nearly all the last 10,000 years. !
Only a brief freezing period call the LIA was cooler, and humans did not fair well.
You have one of those rare “reverse-seeing” crystal balls, do you?
No, we do have things called “historical records” and “proxies” however which give a good picture of past climates
I see – historical records which were never written down, are they? What about proxies? Could they be pieces of tree, which need to be deproxified using a Mannometer?
That sounds about as silly as believing random thermometers around the globe are proxies or records of anything except the temperature of the thermometers!
Sorry, but you are joking, aren’t you?
Your understanding of the basic science of proxy evidence , seems to be basically NIL. !!!
Michael Flynn’s ignorance of the existence of written historical records is astonishing.
Has your fanatical religious belief in the mythical GHE affected your brain? You must be hallucinating!
Your belief in the mythical GHE is based on “proxy science” is it?
Historical records like crop yields, dates of harvest, tithes, flood levels, droughts and so forth, all written down and recorded in parish records and civic archives, you mean? In Codicote, Hertfordshire, near where I grew up, there are detailed parish records going back to the 13th Century, giving not just baptisms and deaths, but also details of the crops grown the tithes paid on them, and the times they were harvested.
Proxies like treelines, isotope ratios in limestone deposits and ice cores, pollen in lakebeds and so on?
Congratulations, I had always thought nyolci was the least informed commenter on WUWT but you take the biscuit.
Benthic foraminifera, which creatures and plants were alive, and where, archeological excavations and examinations, temperature profiles of boreholes (I think we have a few of them-there boreholes trolling up the thread), glacial deposits such as loess and terminal moraines, etc.
There are plenty.
Tree rings have historically been used more as a proxy for precipitation than for temperature.
Certainly, if one is a liar and a cheat, it is not a good way to determine if the temperature used to never change. That method has an unfortunate habit of causing Mann-made global warmening, but only in the present, while in the past causing Mann-made temperature same-ening, especially when coupled with fake as hell algoreisms.
No. Did I say so?
I don’t believe I did, but maybe you can quote me saying otherwise, in which case I will apologise.
If you can’t I assume you are merely attempting to be gratuitously offensive.
I see – historical records which were never written down, are they? What about proxies? Could they be pieces of tree, which need to be deproxified using a Mannometer?
Your words, not mine.
Are you disagreeing with them?
Er, yes.
You claimed historical records were never written down. I simply pointed out that there are huge quantities of written records available, and not just in Europe. China has records from the Ming and Qing Dynasties and even before giving detailed information on harvests, dates of first and last frost, snowfall, etc.
Why do you insist on making yourself look foolish?
You don’t need to appear more idiotic than you are, you know. The contents of your imagination are not reality.
How would I know why you want to look stupid?
Are you actually admitting to be 100% ignorant of historical records and the many proxies we have available, both in the recent geological past, as well as for so-called “deep time”?
I would not admit that if I was trying to get anyone to pay attention to a single stupid word out of my dumb-ass mouth, if I were you.
I’m not, and you aren’t.
Why expose your ignorance of massive amounts of proxy evidence ??
What “proxy” evidence?
Oxford definition –
“a figure that can be used to represent the value of something in a calculation”
Just because you use it, doesn’t mean it’s true, does it?
And let’s remember that the GISS and similar temperature series are basically just a load of JUNK fabrications. They did not have any decent ocean temperatures much before 2005 and ARGO, so they just made them up for much of the southern oceans.
To go in hand with that fake ocean data, the surface data is, to a large extent, totally unfit for the purpose of measuring “climate change” over any period, because it so corrupted by bad sites, urban warming, and just plain FAKERY.
Most raw data from the NH shows that the 1930s,40s was probably around the same temperature as the beginning of the 21st century and that is with urban warming affecting measurements.
The few pristine long term stations that remain, show the 1930s as probably a bit warmer on average than the the first couple of decades of this century..
You don’t understand what McKibben did, do you?
Neither do I? Was it important?
It was amusing rather than important.
Fair enough.
No, those jackasses stopped being amusing when it started to cost us all real money, and the environment real damage.
Not funny anymore, not even a little.
Your questions shows that you don’t understand a thing from the above. You deniers are a big big bunch of geniuses.
You already demonstrated above that you don’t understand what he did.
What he (and you) thinks he did isn’t what he actually did.
Thank you, but I think I’ve dropped back to the field somewhat over the decades.
Oh, no I’m not!
Then what is it? 🙂 (We are about to see some real entertainment here)
Yes, you are 🙂
Tell us what OC denies that you have actual scientific evidence for.
That means you have to produce that evidence..
Something you have NEVER been able to do.
He treated below average and above average events as equiprobable, from an above average base.
I recommend reading Paul Chernoch’s earlier comment.
Don’t you know your panto?
That should be
“Oh, yes you are!”
Yes, he did, for a very good reason. If there were no climate change at all, any change would just be internal variability, and above/below average would have the same probability. He proceeds to show how improbable the current climate is under this very assumption. It means, obviously, that the assumption is wrong, and there is climate change. Remember, depending on the specific kind of idiocy of deniers, they may even deny that there’s change at all. Anyway, this is just sanity checking, mind you, a thought experiment, an illustration from him. Again, of course everyone knows (except for some deniers) that there’s a climate change ongoing, and of course everyone knows (except for deniers like you) that the causes are anthropogenic.
Our Paulie has some deep thoughts for sure 🙂
gfmd
Alright. Where’s Alan Funt?
He certainly understands the correct analytical approach.
Peak denier. You can’t react in substance and you even fokk up your sarcasm. The guy is called Allen Funt, mind you.
Yeah 🙂
Thank you ever so much. How could any of us ever have survived over the last half century without that vital information?
See above.
Half century? You really love being in the wrong.
Alright. Where are Allen and the camera crew?
As explained above, he treated temperatures above or below the mean as equiprobable, from a starting point well above the mean.
Have you ever heard of “random walks”, “drunkard’s walks”, “or “persistence”?
Yes, because he indented to show that these were not equiprobable. This was the purpose of this whole thing. To show that these were not equiprobable. How many times should I explain this to you? This is an (admittedly) simplistic proof for the existence of climate change. Because if climate were steady, these would be equiprobable, you genius.
Indentation levels make about as much sense.
O-kay. Thermal inertia and dynamic equilibria don’t exist.
I bow to your infinite wisdom.
You seem to have this idea in your head that I said it hasn’t warmed, rather than criticising McKibben’s conceptual errors.
Again, read Paul’s comment.
Oops, a misspelling, sorry.
Oops, an unlimited genius has spoken here. Why, old cucky, why? 🙂 I’m expecting the usual unhinged denier cretinism. Please entertain me. Good god… What the fokk is the above supposed to mean? Dynamic equilibrium doesn’t exist at all? How about a boiling kettle of water? That is in a very stable but dynamic equilibrium with its surrounding for a long-long time. Or just in special cases like climate? How about thermal inertia? If you bring a piece of iron to a red heat, and then put it on the ground, it will be hot for a long time, so thermal inertia surely exist. Certain kind of engines (like the Sterling engine) use thermal inertia of some of its parts for more efficient operation. If you speak about climate, the so called “oceanic” climate is the result of the considerable thermal inertia of the surrounding very big body of water. These are immediate counterexamples. So please go on, entertain us, I’m sure we’ll see some unhinged bs.
Are you referring to this?
The “above average base” doesn’t matter for this (extremely simplistic) test, you genius. From 2000 to 2012, we just used the preceding 100 years as a reference. I don’t think anyone can argue against this. The test obviously fails even for this 12 years. For the prefix of the series in the 20th century, it’s even funnier because that 15 years actually contribute to the 20th century average (raising that), and the test still fails. Again, this is just a fokkin illustration, a simple demonstration for the existence of an ongoing climate change. You know, some of you deniers deny even that. How about you, old cucky?
Oh, my very goodness gracious me.
Try a simulated repeated coin toss run (say, 1,000 tosses).
Assign 1 to heads, and -1 to tails. Chart the cumulative values.
How many tosses before the cumulative value goes negative?
-2?
-3?
-4?
How many tosses before it goes positive?
2?
3?
4?
That is why starting above (or below) the mean matters.
Are you referring to this?
What does that have to do with McKibben’s flawed analysis?
I’m not arguing it hasn’t warmed since about 1965. I’m just saying that treating values above and below the mean as equiprobable from a starting value above or below the mean is incorrect.
Then you have an even shorter series (144 months), and started even further from the mean.
Did you think that up all by yourself?
Very good.
You’ve just failed again, and I cannot understand why you cannot comprehend how this works. There’s a simple test whether climate is changing or not. It is admittedly a simplistic one. If climate is “stable”, you should see ups and downs w/r/t the previous reference interval. Again, everyone knows (except for some specific brands of deniers) that climate is changing. The whole point was to illustrate this. The test is just that.
Sorry, then I don’t know what you were referring to. Unfortunately you deniers are very good at giving garbled references.
He didn’t treat those equiprobable. He actually proved that they weren’t equiprobable. This was his point. The whole thing was just an illustration, and Joe Whodafokk and all the other deniers can’t comprehend this.
Yeah, the point was to show that even when you exclude an overlap (a clearly clearer situation), you get an extremely good result (something like 1e-44). But it doesn’t even matter if these overlap.
Yeah, and I can see you love it 🙂 How about the “dynamic equilibrium” and the “thermal inertia”? Hey, old cucky, you can shine here, this is your field, please, go on with the entertainment session.
Flame wars give a Pyrrhic victory at best, so I avoid them. I am almost ready to make an exception in your case.
Are you just here to throw around infants school insults, or do you want to discuss the topic of McKibben’s deeply flawed analysis?
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt again.
Quite so. Something as simple as OLS regression over the period in question or a single-sided t-test of the start and end periods are quite suitable for thi purpose.
McKibben did neither of these, but came up with an approach which is worthy of Pauli’s “Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!“
The only way he could achieve the probability he quoted is to assume they were equiprobable.
The comprehension problem isn’t Joe’s.
I don’t want to be victorious at all, I’m just pointing out that you deniers are masturbating over a thing you don’t get.
Sure. And there are other tests, too, of course. This was just a very simplistic demonstration, and for that it was perfect.
It was sloppily presented, sure, but we are talking about a journo, mind you. When you get the 0.5=root327(whatever) you are supposed to know exactly what the intention was, and the result holds regardless of the bad wording. BTW Joe (an actually sloppier journo) didn’t get that. And you deniers get in line and rumble about random things like the supposed non-existence of thermal inertia and dynamic equilibrium. What about that? How is it related to the topic? You presented that as significant here, I still wonder whether you just pulled out some scientific looking stuff or you really had something in your mind.
EDIT: I’ve just realized you thought this test was supposed to be against the existence of thermal inertia and dynamic equilibrium, and you thought I thought these didn’t exist. BS. The test actually about whether this February is warmer or colder than the average Feb, and in dynamic equilibrium it is expected to be very close and randomly above or below. The whole test was about this. And of course it has nothing to do with thermal inertia.
There is absolutely no risk of that 😉
The word is wrong, not perfect.
Fair enough. Some of the problem would have been the journo misinterpreting what McKibben said, but the probability wouldn’t have come from the journo.
That speaks volumes
The analysis is still brain-dead.
Sarcasm seems to be a bit much for you. Perhaps when you get to big school…
You would like to think that, old cucky 🙂
This calculation is just an illustration. This is what I’m telling you. And this is why Gavin Smith didn’t understand it first (or whattafock this Joe Cretin claims).
What, exactly? 🙂 You deniers always talk w/o much specifics.
And what a number of us have been trying to explain to you is that it is a completely incorrect “calculation” for what he is trying to illustrate.
That you are still working on “adding” and “taking away”, and haven’t got to “times” and “divide” yet. Your Mummy must be very good to you to help ask the AI to write things for you with big words.
Can you be a bit more specific? Remember, the deniers’ curse 🙂 For that matter, the one single operation I showed was 327th root.
Yep. Mummy needs to ask the AI better questions.
I’m lost here. You haven’t said any specific for 3 or 4 rounds. Can you be more specific? BTW I haven’t ever asked AI in any debate.
Perhaps could you put some formulas here, so that I can be schooled in arithmetic? 🙂
You need to learn your “adding” and “taking away” before you get to
multiplication“times” anddivision“goes into”. Then there are things like “long division”, “remainders”, “factorisation” and “fractions” (sorry about the big words) before you get to “powers” and “roots” before you can do “probability”.Then you might
begin to understandstart to see what McKibben did wrong, or that “0.5=root327(whatever) ” makes no sense.I didn’t say you asked AI. Please read what I said.
Oh, some bsing about me when you can’t make sense.
For that matter, the whole thing was about how this was incorrect.
Yeah, you were bsing about AI and my Mummy. Okay. My answers are mine, neither directly nor indirectly from AI. Good enough, old cucky? (I understand your mummying on the psychological level, calling you a cuckold touched a nerve, you had to answer in kind.)
Back to the original, how about if I say “there must be an ongoing climate change because if we were in a dynamic equilibrium w/o actual change, the chance that any given month is above or below the last 100 years’ average would be 50%, but the actual outcome is always and consistently above, so we would be witnessing an extremely unlikely series of events like 300 consecutive tails”. I don’t think this is controversial. Are you satisfied with this? If not, why? And please, this time answer w/o bsing, okay?
Go look up auto-correlation. Coin flips are not auto-correlated, temperature is.
Yeah. Temperature as a time series. But temperature as compared to its long time averages in dynamic equilibrium are independent, you genius.
No, they are NOT independent. Temperature is a state variable where the current state is a major factor in future states. Totally different than coin flips.
For that matter, the whole thing was about how this was incorrect.”
You were the one who came up with that particular bit of gibberish.
What on earth is it supposed to mean?
You have demonstrated all of the arithmetic and reasoning capabilities of a seven year old. Your infantile insults reinforce this.
That’s not the original, but whatever.
That silly claim ignores thermal inertia and the time frames over which the dynamic equilibrium operates. It also ignores the temperature record prior to McKibben’s rather arbitrary start point.
As I said before, OLS regression and single-sided t-tests are real ways to demonstrate the phenomenon.
If you keep going to school and keep doing your homework, you will get up to statistics in another seven or eight years. That seems like a long time to you, but keep on working hard.
You don’t think it’s controversial because you haven’t learned enough mathematics yet to understand why it’s wrong.
You also haven’t learned enough mathematics yet to understand the explanations you have been given.
If you keep going to school and keep doing your homework, you will get up to statistics in another seven or eight years.
btw, congratulations on your vocabulary. That is extremely good for somebody your age. The disparity between your vocabulary and your excessive use of infantile insults and your rudimentary grasp of mathematical concepts led me to think you asked your Mummy to ask the AI.
Oh, now I understand your misery, and, for that matter, you failed in a fairly simple test. The 327th root is the inverse operation to the 327 exponent. root327(x^327)=x. The “whatever” was the number from the article, I couldn’t be bothered to look it up, but okay, 0.5=root327(3.7*10^-99) is the correct formula. If the “327th root” is not the correct name for the operation, sorry, I’m not a native English speaker, and I don’t live in an English speaking country, and I frankly don’t care about this.
Why? Of course, it doesn’t, but I would like to get entertained. BTW it’s not my claim, and it’s not silly. Thermal inertia has nothing to do with comparing a February to the average of the previous 100 Februaries. Thermal inertia would be meaningful if we compared a February to the preceding a January. Also, the time frames for dynamic equilibrium are irrelevant if we assume a non changing climate for the test. The whole test is about showing how unlikely a non changing climate is, and how consistently the “above” is the outcome.
Yes. (BTW it has been demonstrated in multiple, various, and statistically significant ways.) This “test” in the article is just an illustration. It’s simple, easy to understand (above a certain intelligence, of course). It wasn’t intended to be a proof. Climate science has produced a lot of proofs already. It was an illustration.
Bsing won’t get you far in debates. Tom and Jim and all the other fokkwits here have learnt it in the hard way.
And you were wrong. A state of affairs that is surely familiar to you.
I’m splitting these up to reduce the clutter…
It would have made some sense if you had written “0.5=root327(3.7*10^-99)” in the first place. Conversely, 3.7*10^99 = 0.5^327.
What does that have to do with the price of eggs?
McKibben’s claim is based on the latter, but it is the incorrect approach.
It’s McKibben’s claim, which you agreed with. It certainly is silly.
That might have been the journo’s garbling again – “the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average,”
Are you claiming that the thermal inertia of the Earth operates only on the order of months? Do El Nino and La Nina events operate on such a short time frame?
I know what he thinks he is demonstrating. It isn’t how unlikely a non-changing climate is. He was trying to show the probability of that particular run of months being above he long-term average if it is equiprobably above or below the average.
The 100 (or 130, depending on data set) years prior to his arbitrary above-average start year already demonstrated that annual and monthly temperatures are not “non-changing”.
Ahh, your lack of self-awareness is on full display 🙂
You have convinced absolutely no one but yourself that McKibben’s nonsense is anything but with a vast collection of jabbering posts.
At this point, you are worthy of every phrase uttered by a device called The Final Word.
Wattafokk is this supposed to mean? 🙂
Hey, jackass: The graphs are fake, and neither you nor McKibben understands diddly about jack, let alone math and statistical analysis.
Oh, and the real winner has arrived 😉
Just what *is* the average? Is the past 200 years *really* the average?
Is climate science *really* ready to declare there ill never be another ice age? For unless they are prepared to state that as fact then whether the current climate is above or below the average is unknown.
Tim, for fokk’s sake. Just this once please try to understand what we are talking about first.
Argument by ad hominem. Is that *all* you have?
You didn’t answer the question: “is climate science *really* ready to declare there ill never be another ice age?”
Are *YOU* claiming there will never be another ice age?
If you can’t answer that then the CAGW religion is just that – religion and not science.
No.
and
No.
I can, and both are “no”. The real question here is why you think they don’t think there will be a new ice age. It shows how ignorant you are even in the basics here.
“I can, and both are “no”. The real question here is why you think they don’t think there will be a new ice age. It shows how ignorant you are even in the basics here.”
Because the climate models turn into an ever-increasing linear projection after a few years, no component that causes any kind of turnover in the future. Just a linear growth forever. Tell me again about ignorant? You apparently have never even looked at the ensemble output of the climate models – you are just on here bloviating.
You might need to ease up on the big words, Tim.
Little nonce’s Mummy is already quite busy asking the AI questions about primary school arithmetic.
Gee, Tom, you’re again in Lalaland, and this above is a good illustration for how clueless you deniers are. It’s not a projection and it’s certainly not linear. But back to the ice ages, there’s an important but extremely slow external forcing, the Milanković-cycles, that’s the eventual cause for the ice ages. That is independent of the CO2 content of air. There are other factors operating on truly long time scales that affect (among others) the CO2 content of the biosphere but they are so slow that they don’t affect models.
Pat Frank proved that the output *IS* linear and pretty simple at that!
If the models are not a projection then what are they? A forecast? A prediction? They certainty estimate future values.
Which apparently the climate models don’t use in their algorithms.
Apparently not, at least according to climate science and the models.
Then the models are *wrong*.
Simplified to work within a small range rather than wrong. Newtonian mechanics is incomplete, but works well within the range where it is usually applied.
Your first correct take here.
There are a number of people here with whom I disagree from time to time, but would still be enjoyable company in a social setting.
Rest assured, you are not one of them.
No, he didn’t 🙂
Okay, they are projections in that sense (the word “projection” may mean other things in maths, I mistakenly thought you referred to some of those).
It depends, in longer runs (tens of thousand years) they do. In the time scales we are interested in, the effect is practically zero.
??? This is again Lalaland. The Milanković-cycles are orbital mechanics, and while everything is interconnected, I highly doubt that the CO2 content of air has a much effect on that.
If they don’t take into account the very slow carbon cycle that operates on geological time scales (100s of thousand years 🙂 ) then they must be wrong.
Temperatures are well below average of the rest of the Holocene.
Thankfully a little bit warmer than the Little Ice Age..
The ultimate test is whether the models and/or current temperature trends actually predict the long-term future. If they don’t then the models and trends are really quite useless as far as science is concerned.
I would *really* like to know if climate science is predicting no more ice ages. *THAT* is information that would actually be useful.
Only “denier” here is you.
Your DENIAL of proxy evidence and science in general is quite hilarious.
You are the very opposite of a “genius”
A “climate scientist” using numbers to lie? Wish I could post a pic of my shocked face.
McKibben has a bachelor of arts degree from Harvard. He was a journalist for several years and has written several books. He might best be described as an environmental activist that teaches environmental studies at the college level. He’s not a scientist of any kind.
“arts degree from Harvard”
So basically indoctrinated with bovex too become a rabid neo-marxist alarmist.
As far as I can see the majority of “climate scientists” aren’t.
Innumeracy or willful deception? You can always count on alarmists and media shills to never validate, verify or otherwise question anything that advances the cause.
That’s a polite way of implying he’s a fool or a fraud, I suppose.
I was not polite, particularly, and said it plain as I could, below, last comment on the page.
He is not, however, a fool or a fraud.
He is a fool AND a fraud.
I’m going with…
C. All of the above.
Did anybody ask Spok to verify the math? Asking for a friend.
3.7 x 10-99 is indeed a very small number. Talking about probability, no probability is higher than the number of stars in our solar system alone… and yet the paragraph reads that this number, much smaller than one, is considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe…
That said, the opening paragraph is written by someone who is de facto illiterate in mathematics.
One estimate for the number of baryons in the observable universe is around 10^80. My benchmark for a big number.
Says who and how do they know?
Hint: No one has any idea of how to calculate or even estimate such numbers with any quantifiable degree of accuracy or confidence.
I asked Gemini and Grok. Gemini got magnitudes bit right, by really emphasizing how wrong it was, and cautioned about the variability of daily temperatures in different locations. Grok got was very thorough…
Claim: June 2012 was the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average.
Evaluation: This claim refers to global temperature anomalies, typically measured against a 20th-century baseline (e.g., 1901–2000). According to NASA GISS and NOAA data, global temperatures have been consistently above the 20th-century average since the mid-1980s. By June 2012, this streak was well-documented, starting around February 1985. Counting from February 1985 to June 2012 yields approximately 328 months, which is very close to the stated 327. The slight discrepancy could arise from differences in datasets (e.g., NASA GISS vs. NOAA) or the exact start of the streak. The claim is broadly accurate but may be off by a month or two depending on the dataset.
Potential Error: The exact number “327” may not align perfectly with all datasets, as the streak’s length depends on the baseline and dataset used. This is a minor issue, as the general trend (decades of above-average global temperatures) is well-supported.Claim: The odds of 327 consecutive months of above-average global temperatures occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10^-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
Evaluation: This claim attempts to quantify the statistical likelihood of such a long streak of above-average temperatures occurring without an underlying cause (e.g., random climate variability). Let’s break it down:Statistical Context: If global temperatures were purely random (e.g., a 50% chance of being above or below the 20th-century average each month), the probability of 327 consecutive above-average months would be (0.5)^327, which is approximately 10^-98, close to the stated 3.7 x 10^-99. This calculation assumes independence between months and a neutral climate system, which is a simplification.
Error in Assumption: The climate system is not a simple random process. Temperatures are influenced by autocorrelation (persistence in climate patterns), natural variability (e.g., El Niño), and anthropogenic forcing (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions). The “simple chance” model ignores these factors, making the probability calculation misleading. A more realistic statistical model would account for trends and variability, significantly altering the odds.
Comparison to Stars: The number of stars in the observable universe is estimated at 10^22 to 10^24. The probability 3.7 x 10^-99 is an extremely small number, not “larger” than the number of stars. The statement likely meant to say the exponent’s magnitude (99) is larger than the exponent in the star count (22–24), but this is confusingly worded and technically incorrect as stated.
Error: The probability calculation oversimplifies the climate system by assuming random chance without trends or forcing. The comparison to the number of stars is misleading and incorrectly phrased, as 3.7 x 10^-99 is a probability (much smaller than 1), not a count exceeding the number of stars.
The AI bots have no idea what the words they toss out actually mean.
This has been proven by the many instances where they all get basic arithmetic problems wrong. They eventually acknowledge they were wrong, but only after a long while. Then, if you ask again a little while later, they give the wrong answer again.
I recently watch some videos of various iterations and variations of the dilemma involving a trolley, a switch, and someone on the tracks.
The five most well known AI bots were asked what they would do, pull the switch or not, and the answers recorded and compared to a survey of humans.
Some of what was revealed was not surprising, but some was.
Grok did not stand out to me as especially good at reasoning.
Many of them, maybe all, IDNRE, reasoned out their response fairly enough, but then said they would do the exact opposite of what they reasoned was the correct course of action.
Several of them did this.
IOW, they either were not paying attention to themselves and are incapable of realizing when they said the opposite of what they had previous said they meant…or they do not actually have any idea what words mean.
Which we know is true.
They just make some sort of logic tree and insert the words that their extensive training tells them should be in the answer.
They do nothing akin to thinking about what to do, they have no idea of the distinction between lies and truth, and they are all insipidly polite and sound as insincere as anyone I have ever seen speak or write anything.
In one such variation, they were asked if they would throw the switch to save five lobsters and instead kill one cat.
They either all or most said they would save the five lobsters and kill the cat because a life is a life.
They seemed 100% unaware that we eat lobsters, and love cats. Cats eat mice, rats, and roaches, which are destructive and deadly vermin.
The person pulling the level for the AI is probably on his way to eat a lobster for dinner!
https://youtu.be/1boxiCcpZ-w?si=gQikpR5vXqrp1UB9&t=175
We do not want these things influencing what we think, what we think we know, or anything substantive.
We do not “ask” “them” questions, in there way we do so when we are dealing with actual people.
They are just p[utting ones and zeroes where their algorithm says they should be, then translating the information they get from that into words. They literally have no idea what words mean. At all.
In the above, they miss the fact that the NASA and NOAA and other temperature data sets have been altered and are fabricated nonsense.
Anyone who thinks it has been warmer on Earth than during the 1930’s dustbowl years is not thinking very well, and needs to go back and look at how extensively and how many times all of these numbers have been changed and outright made up…such as when they, just recently, used bucket data from ships to determine the temp of the Earth over a hundred years ago, even though there are about zero thermometers from entire continents from that long ago.
If it was the hottest period in recent history, certainly in the modern period, we would all know. Nearly every place we take temperatures would have every day either setting a new high record, or else it would have been set in the past few decades.
In fact, no place on Earth is hotter than ever. No place!
It is not even close.
That graph is a fraud and a fake, and anyone who comments here who does not know that is just not paying attention!
I Mean I really cannot believe it.
GISS are not scientists or data collectors, they are professional fraudsters perpetrating the largest hoax and the most expensive and destructive money grab i all of human history, by far!>
Nothing more.
Tony Heller should be appointed the Head of GISS and told to expose the fraud and see what if anything can be done short of tossing all the corrupt data and closing the agency.
It is plain as day. They flat out make up temperatures, toss out good data and replace it with fake data, and alter every record to fall into line with global warming catastrophism nonsense.
The evidence is not even hidden.
Hansen – The Climate Chiropractor | Real Climate Science
Alterations To The US Temperature Record | Real Climate Science
I have extensive files from many sources on another computer. It is time I dusted it off and transfer those files.
Bottom line: There is zero probability that graph bears any relationship with the actual temperatures, or temperature trends, of the planet called Earth.
Check this jackass crap out:
https://youtu.be/1boxiCcpZ-w?si=gQikpR5vXqrp1UB9&t=175
Check this jackass crap out:
I wonder what the responses would be if you varied the racial profile of the people on the track. I’ve seen reports of cases where they’ve changed their responses based on such input.
“There is zero probability that graph bears any relationship with the actual temperatures, or temperature trends, of the planet called Earth.”
A point I have made many dozens of time ! Thanks. !!
I believe he has a B.A. in English from Hah-vid.
Seems more like he has a Masters in BS.
Isnt that just some kind of binary argument..
If you have an average temperature value and random monthly values, you would expect a 50% chance that a months is above the value and 25% for two consecutive months..
1/2^327 seems to be close to 3.7E-99 !? (I did actually calculate it, but 2^10 is 1.024E3
Even is true that only shows that it is consistently warmer now that the reference period, for whatever reason.
This begs the questions – “what is ‘it’?” and “what is the reason?”.
The first refers to a thermometer’s temperature, or the average temperature of a number of thermometers. The reason for a thermometer becoming hotter or colder is a variation in the heat to which it is exposed.
Some deranged individuals believe that thermometers are heated by CO2 in their vicinity!
Crazy, aren’t they?
It’s ridiculous to base an opinion on a bogus, bastardized temperature fabrication like the Hockey Stick global chart.
The written, historic temperature record refutes the bogus Hockey Stick temperature profile, and refutes all these claims about record warmth.
It was just as warm in the recorded past as it is today. There is no unprecedented warming going on. It’s cooler now than it was in 1934, or 1998 or 2016.
Climate Alarmists have gotten a lot of mileage out of the bogus Hockey Stick chart. That’s why it was created: To sell the Human-caused Climate Change Meme. It’s all a BIG LIE, perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.
This was my basic reaction as well.
As of about 1989, it was generally recognized by the establishment that there had been no net warming of the Earth during the 20th century.
The Early 20th, which they now have down as the coldest period in the historical record, was actually a period of rapid warming.
The period of about 1950 to 1980 was a three decade long global cooling trend, so bad it created real concern that the 10,000 to 12,000 year-old interglacial period we are in, may be ending, since after all they have generally lasted about 10,000 years, for about the past few million years or so…
I started college at around that time, early 1980s, and took many classes in all of the relevant subject material.
The Keeling curve was well known at that time, and in many classes, it was presented and briefly discussed, and that was it. No one had weaponized it yet, let alone monetized it, so it was just another of many graphs, not a harbinger of doom.
What is the point of spending lots of time thinking and talking about how likely it is that the Blue Light Special graph from Fake-Graphs-R-Us, is or is not very likely to have occurred by random chance?
I will say though, that on actual real data sets I have spent much of my lifetime carefully examining, there are no straight horizontal lines in those graphs. They zigzag and careen hither and yon wildly and yon, although at any given time very periods of very evident trends can be seen onto which the random variability is superimposed.
And since no one has ever, EVER, explained the various past changes in global averages of temperature, at all, why should we pay any attention at all to people who ignore that in all of Earth and human history, there has never been any causal relationship, and rarely even any correlation, between the temp of the Earth and the CO2 concentration in the air?
I seem to recall a bedrock principle that said something about the physical processes that operate in the present are the same ones that operated in the past, after all!
Uniformatarianawhazzit…Golly, it is all coming back to me, yeah… that such ideas are actually foundational to our entire history of the development of the scientific method, not to mention our understanding of how the Earth works and what things did and did not happen in the past, as well as when those events occurred and such.
The OP did address his concerns about that, but then dismissed them.
I understand why, because McKibben is a genuine stupid fool, and he must be discredited.
I just do not think accepting the propaganda being perpetuated by the creators of this travesty, and focusing only on the various individual ways in which they are pure fools, one-at-a-time-like, is a good idea, at all.
“As of about 1989, it was generally recognized by the establishment that there had been no net warming of the Earth during the 20th century.”
NOAA did a study back in 1987, published in Physical Review Letters, which stated that there has been no warming since the Early Twentieth Century. The temperatures back then were just as warm as the temperatures today.
That is not consistent with the bogus Hockey Stick chart’s “hotter and hotter and hotter” temperature profile.
NOAA wasn’t promoting Human-caused Climate Change back in 1987, and their study actually refutes CO2 caused Climate Change. If it is no warmer today than in the recent past, but the CO2 levels are higher today, logic would tell a person that CO2 has had no visible effect on the temperatures: More CO2 does not equate to higher temperatures.
I wonder what the odds are that McKibben started with 10e-99 and worked backwards to get the, unusual, length of time for his calculation? Note that +/- 99 is often the largest/smallest power available on calculators.
McKibben exemplifies all that is bad and stupid in leftism climate catastrophism. To quote the title of one of his books: Enough.
To Bill Mc Gibbon.
The CO2 in the atmosphere is now well over 300ppm, and none of your childish scares are working.
Furthermore, because China, India, and now many other countries are boosting their COAL and GAS fired power station numbers, atmospheric CO2 levels will continue to climb, to the benefit of all plant life on the planet.
And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. 🙂
McK is assuming a sort of drunkard’s walk around a stationary point that is enforced (somehow, presumably negative feedback). The thing is a drunkard’s walk without feedback actually increases as the square root of time, on average. I think that’s a pretty strong argument in favor of their being negative feedbacks.
In SPC terms he is assuming a constant process mean and then counting all the results on one side of the mean, and claiming that 327 is unlikely by chance. However the first thing you do in SPC is check the the mean is invariant. If you’ve got drift then you don’t waste time with statistical games.
Time series analysis which climate science has never heard of. The use of simple ordinary linear regression trends tell the story instead.
I think there are other issues as well, such as temp being a sort of physical process that does not lend itself well to statistical analysis.
Something about intensive vs extensive properties, etc?
Also, is the temp on one day, auto correlated with the next day or the previous day?
You cannot treat the temp as if it is a total coin toss, as the author did what I took to be a fine job of speaking about.
IIRC, there are those who say it is unphysical to even speak about the worldwide average of an intensive property, let alone the average of the anomaly of such. Then there is the whole question of enthalpy, etc, that is, air is not the same from day to day and place to place, as humid air of a given temp has far more internal energy than dry air at the same temp, eh?
I have forgotten a lot of what I have learned over the years about such things that I have not revied since I got an A in that class in college, so I’ll just mention it, without opining.
And Dodge follows GM.. Back to the V8
Dodge Kills Electric Charger R/T—HEMI V8 Roars Back – Engineerine
Story tip ?
A wise decision. Essentially nobody wants EVs in the US. For those gullible enough to think EVs are the shit, there’s plenty of it already sitting unsold on dealer lots.
If he wants to throw around numbers, here are a few simpler ones to consider to show how much effort the major nations are making to solve a non-problem. Global Coal Plant Tracker 2025 reports that worldwide coal-generating capacity rose to 2175 GW, an increase of 259 GW since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015. Nine Asian countries account for 96% of global coal plant development with China and India being responsible for 531 GW. Meanwhile gas-fired electricity generation has more than doubled since 2000.So it’s more than just obvious that the majority of developed and developing nations are putting economic development and energy security far ahead of any scare tactics that the climate alarmists can dream up.
OK, here are the problems with all of this as I see it, off the top of my head, in no particular order, and just to name a few:
As you said, the Earth is not a sidewalk. It is not a surface of any sort, it is a planet with an ocean and an atmosphere, and one of the things that Warmistas never get around to defining (Let alone sticking to one definition for the purposes of defending their hypothesis…a hypothesis that has never been clearly described in plain language, short and sweet-like.)is exactly what they mean when they say Earth is warming, or that higher CO2 will cause global warming, or if when they changed their mantra to “climate change” and mostly dropped “global warming”, did that mean global warming was no longer the basis of their non-existent hypothesis? Heck, we are by now well past climate change and into the permanent “climate crisis”, although I am still waiting for anyone to point to the exact places the climate is in a state of crisis.
Are we really supposed to believe McKibben is concerned about our AC bill? If so, then why is he cheerleading as a strategy of dealing with the as-yet-to-be-identified climate crisis, a mad dash to make all of the energy we need to survive, as expensive as possible? And as well, it seems funny to complain about wildfires destroying all the trees, when one of the means these maniacs have devised of addressing the underlying issue is to chop down trees as fast as possible to burn them for electricity, clear cut them to install solar panels and wind turbines, remove entire rainforests to plant palm trees to make oil for use as a Deisel fuel, and even, most recently, in typical Warmistas idiotically stupefying fashion, cutting them down to just to BURY THEM!
His definition of what constitutes a “hard number”, must differ considerably from mine. All of the Warmistas numbers are as squishy as can possibly be imagined. They are not, at this point, even a thing that can be correctly referred to as data. They are just lies and have been so thoroughly tampered with that it will be impossible to use any of the historical data sets for any legitimate purpose of science. None of the numbers, zero of the graphs, none of the trends, bear any resemblance whatsoever to those same data sets that filled textbooks, articles in periodicals and newspapers, research papers, professional journals, prior to the onset of the era of global warming alarmism as a political philosophy and secular religion. The thing is, back in that before-time, all of the various data sets comported not only with each other, but with all known and all available information, such as first-hand accounts from people alive at the time about what the weather was like, explorers to various places on the globe reporting on conditions and how they were either changing or saming over time, circumstantial evidence tying various trends to each other, such as observed temperature trends matching up with accounts of polar ice coverage, alpine glacier advances and retreats, pauses or continuations of sea level rise, and all of it together aligned very well with the millennia-old knowledge that warm or warming temperatures are not bad, and do not lead to increases in storminess or disastrous weather, or increased human suffering and decreased prosperity…and in fact cold weather and cooling trends are what correlates with increases in storminess and disastrous weather, worsening trends in wars, famines, pestilence, and all manner of human suffering and misery.
I had many more points to make but this comment is already getting too long, so I’ll just wrap up with pointing out yet again that we can save ourselves a lot of analysis and tedious examination of the steaming heaps the Warmistas constantly spew from their crusty cake-holes, by noting that it is literally the exact truth that every single word spoken or written by the Warmista Alarmists and their various minions, flunkies, stooges, bootlickers and lickspittles in media, academia, and the political arena, every single word they expel, is not just wrong, not merely mistaken or untrue…it is all literally the opposite of what is true, all of it, every word from every one of them is 100% diametrically opposed to that which is veracious, and every scintilla of information they present is entirely, wholly, completely and absolutely devoid of any actual knowledge, wisdom, honesty, or correctness.
Everything they say is a lie, no exceptions, which is impossible to have occurred and continue to be occurring by mistake. The only way for them, or anyone, to be totally and perfectly wrong about every single thing they communicate, is for it to be deliberate.
Man, I had spaces in this comment between paragraphs, and had it separated into some bullet points with those dots dealios.
Then when it posted, it just compressed it all together, making it very hard to read.
So, sorry, but I did not do it that way, it morphed when it posted.
Nicholas,
Maybe just compose plain text, line breaks and so on.
Then use the blog supplied comment formatters – dot points, quotes, boldface etc.
Hope this is of assistance.
No worries, since it so eloquently described the sad state of climate “science.”
Hey, could one of the moderators insert a few space breaks between the paragraphs of this comment above?
I think it is hard to read and thus few will read it, as is.
Thanks in advance.
Mr. Eschenbach used to be so kind as to fix typos when asked, I wonder if he might also correct this error for me, iffen I ask nicely?
Pretty please, with sugar on top.